From Nikola Tesla: Modern Times Seen through the Lens of the Past
“In your troubled times, when things seem fraught with more dread, terror, abuse, lies, manipulation, injustice, and cruelty than usual, it seems absurd to say that Humanity is actually improving! But if you look only a little way back into history, you must at least entertain the idea that human beings are already calmer, kinder, more compassionate, and wiser than many even 200 years ago.
“You already decided back then that slavery should no longer be an institution, something that happened to everyone and anyone without notice. When slavery is practices, it must be hidden, furtive, and disguised with lies, misdirection, misdirection, and other kinds of desperate camouflage. In short, those who practice it finally know that it is wrong, and not inevitable.
“Granted, you still have horror films, and wrestling and boxing matches, and occasionally vicious dramas, but you no longer think that watching someone get hung is a fine afternoon’s pastime. You no longer assume unilaterally that men are the only people that are people: i.e., women, children, and any race other than yours is automatically something to be used as you see fit, period. Yes, you do see the times when these things happen, but you see these things now: they are no longer assumed and assured to be inevitable.
“Yes, many are still hated because they are from the ‘wrong’ country but ‘ethnic cleansing’ has become a crime against humanity. Left-handed people are no longer considered evil or dangerous: the very name ‘sinister’ originally mean ‘left-handed.’ No one is automatically given short shrift, even if they are of the ’right’ class or ‘race,’ because they were born an illegitimate bastard. You have begun listening to the wisdom of those who love profoundly: those who say ’the color of a man’s soul’ matters more than the color of his skin, and ‘Your opinion of me shows me more about you than me.’
“Yes, there are riots, but only rarely do they explode into the wholesale slaughter of the French Revolution’s time of Terror, or the Russian Revolution’s gratuitous murders, or even the costly, mad careen of the American Civil War. Yes, demonstrators have been killed for the sake of lies over truth, control over understanding, and to that fear might obliterate love’s tolerance. But this is seen as excessive force.
“There is more learning in schools, colleges, and universities available now than ever before; there are more ways of telling the truth, as well as telling lies. This last might not seem an improvement, but consider: you are now aware that lies can shape the fate of nations as well as the shape of your own lives, and that you can, even though I might take diligence, determine what is false at last.
“Almost everyone finds hunger to be an usual state of being! And there is so much more…
“Despite my reassurances in the previous Newsletter that, compared to many times in the past, your present world is actually becoming much more civil and gracious than it used to be, so much of the daily news seems to render such a claim absurd: mass shootings everywhere on the planet, threats of forcing Armageddon using nuclear weapons, random people attacked for apparently no reason, as though attacking someone because they are the ‘wrong’ race, religion, from the ‘wrong’ country of doing ‘wrong’ things that are apparently worse than murder makes more sense, It is a flimsy reason at best, but there are those who use such ‘reasons’ to justify these murders.
“There used to be a Department of War in America. Now it is the ‘Department of Defense,’ although it seems too likely that many feel that ‘the best defense is a good offense,’ at least there has been a little thought applied concerning the power of words. Nevertheless, there see so many who are anxious to defend themselves from any slight, any misunderstanding, any perceived rejection that it seems hardly anyone remembers how to be tolerant, on either side.
“Some of the actions meant to change the past, such as removing offensive statues, changing the names of military bases, schools, or sports teams, seem laudable to some and execrable to others. If we make history disappear then perhaps we will repeat it endlessly because we have forgotten many of the lessons we might have learned. But it is a delicate thing to change any mindset rooted in the sense of entitled privilege, because such a sense of privilege mimics an axiom: ‘this is the way things really are.’
“If you expect to get the best of everything, always, simply because you are the ‘right’ kind of person, and people are used to deferring you in all ways: to your preferences, prejudices, quirks, foibles, shortcomings, unreasonable demands… in these ways your society has been engineered for your benefit at everyone else’s cost because, quite frankly, other people don’t really exist for you, or at the least they are not ‘real’ people.
“In short, you have found a way to have a very selfish heaven on Earth: one that assumes you should always win. This is not only arrogance: it is a complete failure of empathic imagination.
“In Volume 5, we have an Appendix which discusses how Humanity might have been interfered with, and that human beings share nearly all the genes of the lowland chimps and the bonobos. Recently, it has been discovered that bonobos have a very large portion of their brains geared for empathy: this is something you have inherited from them! However, if the lowland chimp genes keep getting rewarded, selected for, and expressed, you have social structures like the Mafia, drug lords and street gangs, totalitarian societies, and the privileged few.
“But I do not bring all these things up to generate despair: because you have two sides to your nature genetically, you always have a choice. You are not doomed to be brutes: you can choose empathy, imagination, tolerance, understanding, courage, compassion, and creativity: always.”
